She had known him as Lelouch and as Zero; the slender, attractive student with dazzling eyes and quick curving lips and the masked commander who viewed the world harshly through a oppressive purple shade.
C.C. hadn't seen much potential in Lelouch by way of first impressions. He had enough to entice a geass, but that was his and her subconscious attaching rather then some solid talent or noteworthy past action that struck her.
He was arrogant and high-minded, and above all hopelessly...how would humans put it...young. That was it; young.
Only a youth would rebel in such a flamboyant manner. The flourishing hand gestures, the dramatic escapades, the imperial uniform - all these were Lelouch being young.
And yet it was painstakingly clear to her that he had grown up too quickly, both mentally and physically. Lelouch Lamerouge probably would have had handsome white streaks in his inky hair before thirty.
There were elements of cunning in his movements and a steady sort of ruthlessness entirely unobstructed by malice. Unusual, C.C. noted. Interesting enough to keep.
After all, she had little better to do.
Everything was straightforward. She would watch him like she had the others before him. No need to panic if drama arose. There were always others to provide a necessary replacement should the need arise.
However, the moment she could wrap her mind around his simplicity, he changed. The moment he was clear and blue and she had hung him up to match the navy lace curtains, he became a kaleidoscope of jade and amber.
Suddenly he was breathtaking and beyond her reach. Something in his soul was magnetic and it drew her in as much as it repelled her. A tantalizing mixture that consumed...consumed...
She had prided herself in being the ultimate enigma. It wasn't even a goal she had striven for, but it had come naturally with time.
All things did.
A clock without hands ticking...ticking...a girl with green hair bleeding next to the dead body of a nun...cold, elegant fingers clutching a silver crucifix...glassy eyes regarding the painted glass saints...tick tock...satin strands of sunlight streaming through Mother Mary cold, cold eyes...
Time was something Lelouch did not have as she did.
Often she saw him in her soul's chambers as a double silhouette in a pitch room. Defying all laws, darker then black, starker than white. He was simultaneously young and old, wise and tactless, breathtaking and wildly hideous.
The ultimate enigma. And he wasn't even trying.
Her perfect replacement. It was best to marvel and mold - but do not get too attached.
Too late.
Diamonds slipping like water through her fingers...ribbons of dawn folding against black scrub-brush branches...a horned yellow moon rising with bronze rings...dice rolling across a black and white floor...bells...iron bells...
Drops of blood splattered. The lilies were ruined.
Lelouch never asked her if she hurt whenever she died. He pretended to be supremely unconcerned most of the time or otherwise flew the opposite direction by destroying her enemies with bloodthirsty gusto.
He told Mao 'She is mine!'
Each time he worried over her, she could slap him for his idiocy and kiss him for the thought.
As time went on, she forgot about slapping.
No one else could sink into his jet-fringed violet eyes and want...and want him to command hopelessly.
C.C. had noticed the strands of his dark hair had phantom gold highlights when he cried in the tarnished sunlight. His eyes had never been so pretty...so brilliant a shade of violet...as when she had seen him buried in his elegant white hands...weeping unrestrained...for Euphemia...Nunally...
He had forgotten her the same moment she stood frozen; captivated by the golden hands of morning stroking with feathersoft touches, his ivory jaw and paler cheekbone.
In C world, she sent him to her memory chambers and admired him afterwards when he fought Charles.
Zeus defeating Kronos...C.C. wondered whether he ever pretended to be Hades to accomplish this.
She crushed the little voice that told her he could never be hers. It was no less than C.C. was already terribly aware.
When he saved her from death - the death she wanted - she found she could not be angry. She wanted to be loved and for a moment...one long blessed moment she could pretend...
His arms were around her, he had caught her and held her close. She could feel the hot breaths against her neck. Against the drumming pulse that shrieked 'you are still alive!'
Afterwards, C.C. found her love had magnified to such a proportion, she no longer had a manner of measurement.
Because he told her that he couldn't love her like she wanted...needed...but the way his lips pressed against her forehead and his long, beautiful fingers stroked soothing circles on her arm in a strange reversal of roles was enough.
He cared enough to try.
Lelouch always lied, but his honesty - when placed - was far closer to heartbreaking.
It took all her years of cynicism to flood her voice with mocking laughter as she insisted it was quite unnecessary.
To say she did not care.
The warmth in which he smiled at her was unexpected. The bittersweetness that overcrowded her veins was painfully familiar, if even stronger then it ever had been.
She was his witch - he was her warlock. Accomplices - anything else was too forward. He would accept more if she asked...which meant she never could.
C.C. spent hours remembering the moment of his lips against hers...tasting refined echoes of white wine and a faint underlying of something wild and spicy...the way his eyes had widened before cautiously relaxing...the flutter of eyelashes against her skin...the stutter of pulse beneath warm, human skin...the unconscious flush that she took care not to echo...
He had cried after killing Euphemia.
Pink hair had pillowed around her face like a china doll's halo...poppies for blood...bright red on her lips. Kiss her Zero. She wants to be forgiven and kissed...kissed better...kiss the tears away...
But he was the one crying. His voice was clear behind the mask. The purple cape swirled behind him like an ill-gotten mist and the long tapered fingers curled beneath ebony gloves as he pulled the trigger. His erect form, taller and dreadful in uniform, screamed imperial remorselessness.
But he cried in the Knightmare as though his heart was breaking.
Would he cry over her? Probably. But he had cried over Rolo, over Shirley, over Nunally - C.C. knew she ought to want more than that and she did. But, it pained her to realize, if that was all she could get, then she would be content to take it and hold it against her breast for all of broken eternity and beyond.
He loved them all above natural standards. It wasn't his fault that she was selfish enough to want him entirely.
When Lelouch unfolded his plans for Zero Requiem, she wanted to laugh hysterically. He could kill her and live through it all. But he wouldn't.
Because Lelouch was too devastatingly perfect - in his horribly human, arrogant, lazy, imperfect way - to live like she did. The good ones died for their cause, the bad ones had to slug through it.
Stars were blasting through...melting like droplets in the desert sand...Lelouch was wrapped in crimson silk that crawled in little rivers from beneath his skin...within his heart...and it shifted from red to blue because he was an emperor...purple velvet skies drawn over feathers of a black, black hearse drowning in wild violets with plumed horses and skeleton wheels...
A tearless woman in a mourning veil waits to bury him.
She wanted to laugh until her heart exploded and she cried - cried scorching drops of blood that sizzled in time with the lost fragments of her soul that had risen to scream and long - long for the amethyst eyes and the pale pianist hands and snatches of laughter of the man she could not have.
But she wouldn't do either of those things. C.C. would sit and eat pizza and smile blandly at the sun without humor, as if it was some twisted joke that she managed to still find funny.
She could grieve no other way.
(A/N - in case anyone did not know, violets represent love and are kept in the memory of love. That's why the mad Ophelia mentions - after Hamlet refused her, quite cruelly too - that she's weaving garlands but the violets all wilted when her love died. I have referred to violets in context of Lelouch's eyes and held in his memory.)